I agree–I’d love to have Oracle on Mac, but having used a Mac for more than 9 months and Windows before that, I can’t remember the last time I actually installed Oracle DB on the host OS. I’ve installed a client on the host OS, but all server-related experimentation has been done in VMs. VMWare Fusion on the Mac has been working very well for me in that regard.

It should also be noted that there is an Instant Client for Mac OSX on x86, so there is *some* Oracle software (OCI, sqlplus) available for modern Macs.

I use a Mac at home and have Oracle 11g happily installed in a Linux VM. The VM keeps everything in a self contained package and means the Oracle installation is less likely to be broken whenever Apple has an OS update.